And of course an experienced player would do better at R4 with a new track, because said experienced player has gotten used to the overall feel of the game and knows how goofy the controls are. They have a knowledge advantage rather than a hand to eye coordination one. Again, that’t not skill at all.

Anyone that I’ve seen that has picked up this game has basically said, “WTF?” within a few seconds of driving to drive in this. You can go all the way back to something like Pole Position or even something like Barnstorming and even if you have no idea what the track is, you still should be able to handle your vehicle somewhat decently because it should be somewhat instinctive. You might not get past the first stage, but you should be able to say, press the controller slight to the right and not see your car careen off the road as if you jammed a steering wheel as hard and as fast as you can in that direction.

In the case of R4′s controls, they are bad simply because they are too dodgy. The slightest touch sends you in one direction. There is no real solid handling of any of the cars. A slip-inducing racer is not a well made one. It doesn’t mean it is a bad one, but the degree of sensitivity in R4 makes it inaccessible to most people, albeit it not necessarily gamers who just primarly play racing games. There are lots of ways to define bad controls, but the bottom line is that if an arcade racer has only a D-pad and two buttons and the game’s controls are so senstitve that even people I know that have developed games for next gen systems are sitting here laughing at how sensitive they are…well, that’s not a good sign.

With R4, it’s definitely the timing window, which can be avoided really only by memorization. Skill only comes into play after the memorization by getting faster at when to turn along with understanding how sensitive the controls are, which of course means it is secondary, and that’s again, not a sign of a well made game.

In the end, a well made arcade racer should still feel somewhat like a driving experience, even with a joystick. If you put the equivalent of R4′s extremly sensitive controls into a real vehicle, there would be accidents a plenty and an eventual recall of those vehicles. Seriously, had they actually tightened it up or given a larger window, the game would have fared better in my eyes.

I also understand that it’s okay to be an apologist for a game think have some pretty big flaws. I’m sure I can name some game I love that the majority of people would be like, “Ew.” Every game is someone’s favourite and every game has someone that hate’s it. I don’t feel either about R4. I just feel it’s got some very quirky developer choices that translate into a game that is pretty inaccessible to the average gamer. It’s a game that is geared primarily for multiplayer racing yet is completely unfriendly for a multiplayer experience. It’s also a game with a pretty severe learning curve which again, makes it multiplayer unfriendly. This is a pretty big red flag and again, is why the game gets a “Below Average Game.”

But what about the controls? I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s just that, when someone says “bad controls”, i get a picture much different from what i actually found on this game. Lag, unresponsiveness, the jerky feel that almost every damn old fighting game has, not being able to move during a jump (even if it is more realistic than the opposite idea), confusing button-to-action relationship, all of those and more are issues i think of when i think “bad controls”. For an in-genre issue, Metropolis Street Racer’s drifting. Seriously, every time that white K appears on screen, it’s like the car switches over to a different set of physics laws and promptly hits the wall. Sure MSR fans probably defend it just like i defended R4 not too long ago, but in MSR you’re stuck with one type of car in the beginning (so no switching over to a car with better handling). And regardless of how slip-inducing R4′s laws of physics are, at least there’s only one set of them.

Look, i’m not saying i’m this master of the game that perfectly follows the track. I hit the walls. A lot. If i asked myself “Am i bumping into stuff because i completely screwed up, or because even my decent efforts aren’t good enough for the game’s ridiculous timing window?” and then answered that it was because of the timing window, then i’d say it’s a game with bad controls.

But i don’t; chances are, if i didn’t manage to follow the road, it was because i screwed up something i shouldn’t have. That usually gets proven right on the next lap, by simply staying on track. If i wanted to be pedantic, i could claim the game has bad controls because i fail at performing any sort of U-turn, but really, the real reason as to why i can’t do so is simply because i never press the brake button! How could i claim bad controls when i’m not even trying to press the button?

However, a review is just an opinion, and it’s fine to search out ones that support your own. That’s part of research and debate. However it’s also important to make sure what you are reading is a critique. Too many sites out there regarding video games are generally just emotional reponse without substance or any actual journalism behind it. For every well-written site that gives in-depth commentary on a game, you’ll find a dozen that are simply people with a keyboard that mistake their opinions for facts, that play a game for an hour and then review it based on that short time with the game doing a disrespect to readers and the game itself, or people that obviously don’t have critical or journalistic training.

Take a good long look at that review you linked to. It basically says the same thing I wrote, just not as in-depth and with an inflated score. It too mentions the twitchy hairtrigger controls, but it liked that, where I, and the people I played it with did not. It too praises the soundtrack and unlockables and also mentions the same negatives such as multiplayer has issues and the derth of single player modes. Both reviews also comment that the game is pretty much rote memorization rather than skill. The biggest difference however, is that we gave the game a “Below Average” and they gave it an 8.8.

We at Diehard GameFAN long ago got rid of numerical scores because it became really obvious that both gamers and companies were looking only at the number and not reading the actual review. Sites also began to rate things on a scale from good to excellent instead of actually providing proper criticism about a product. As someone who also working in the developer, pre development and post development of two of the biggest franchises in gaming right now, I can tell you that people in the industry will constantly bitch about the lack of professionalism from reviewers with a numerical scoring process and readers just looking at said number to determine if a product is worth buying, and that’s even when a game gets a high score. So in order to make people actually read the content, we got rid of the numbers, knowing full well this would also remove us from Metacritic and Gamerankings since we have nothing for them to average out. In return though, it ensures we can’t be guilty of giving inflated scores, we can’t do the usual “Swag for scores” other sites and print mags have done in the past, and most of all, that we can retain our journalistic credibility by not being one of those sites where their average score is a 7 even though they use a scale of 1-10.

Basically, what this monologue boils down to is that you linked to a review that brings up every single positive and complaint I do and the only real difference is one liked the twitchy controls and one didn’t. Yet with those differences, one site gave the game a score that should be used for GOTY contendors and the other game it a “it’s not bad, but it’s a hair below the average game in the industry for 2009.” I personally find that pretty telling. For you it might mean, “Diehard GameFAN is a bunch of overly critical pretentious dicks.” It’s all about the conclusion you come to and I won’t fault you for either.

Not saying it’s a bad game, though; all things considered, i spent more time with DUX than with LH:PB. But i do see myself playing LH:PB more in the near future, not so much with DUX. I guess the memories of the original LH are still too fresh (but even then it’s not a matter of it being tragically flawed, instead, it suffers from a serious case of, in the words of dear developer RHE, “You Just Don’t Understand”)

On the faulty controls subject, i’m not 100% sure on what exactly you are complaining about. Sure the game’s tough to get into at first, but you quickly get used to the races by memorizing stuff. Waste some hours on Grand Prix on Easy and you should complete it. The difficulty (of which there are 4 levels, not 3, you might want to correct that) also scales nicely, although personally i’m having a hard time because so far i was going through without using the brakes at all. So assuming one isn’t as lazy as me and learns when to move the finger to that other button, climbing all the way up to the top shouldn’t be an issue at all, other than taking a fair amount of time… which is the point of videogames to begin with.

But, you see, i haven’t yet had the opportunity to play it multiplayer, and i expect very much the same reactions you experienced. While there’s nothing wrong with making a game that actually requires some effort thrown at it in order to be fun, you can’t then give players one meager singleplayer mode and three multiplayer ones! It’s like Senile Team lives in this parallel world in which Dreamcast 2 got released, all your friends have spent some quality time with the game, and then they have these nights just for some R4 Competition! It reminds me of a little story, about how my brother got me into this game, Tetris Attack, and we had some good times, but not one of my friends could play the game decently even if their lives depended on it! And this was already in emulator age, so there’s not even that “But you have the game at home and i don’t” claim.

TL;DR: DUX might be flawed, but it actually pulls off prerendered 3D much better than Mars Matrix ever will so we still like it, R4 was made by a group all too correctly called Senile Team but we still love our elderly so i suppose we can like them (and for fairly similar reasons too), and LH:PB is actually good, with multiple loops and a much better balanced gameplay, but then again if by the fourth iteration they hadn’t got it right..

Also, while we’re at it, any news on Irides?

I knew about the Dux revisions disc as well, but considering you were talking about it being planned for a year, i thought maybe you made a typo and meant LH:PB. At least the Dux revision disc is free. I’m looking forward to giving that a spin-through as well , but honestly, a scoring bug isn’t that big a deal to me compared to controls where I had six different people playing the game with me (although obviously not at once) and everyone was unanimously saying profane things about R4′s controls. Now one of the developers has suggested to me it might be an issue with an HD LCD TV compatability, but today I’ve tried R4 on two other much older TV’s and it still has the control issue, but it still could simply be a unexpected developer thing. I don’t think I’ve played a DC homebrew game yet where I haven’t found some odd little error. At the same time these are indie guys making games in their spare time so of course the quality control isn’t going to be as tight. It’s why I tried to really point out the positives of R4 like the unlockables and the kick ass soundtrack even though I found it lacking.

Hope that helps.

Weird to hear about the money thing with HuCast. Sadly, whether it is true or not, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that on the DC homebrew scene.

and no I meant the DUX revision disc. there have been a lot of obvious bugs such as the score bug and the creator wanted to bring out a revision disc for everyone who ordered it. he promised it
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19727&start=1200

it was not released until today. also the guy kept money from customers over a year. really bad stories.

1. Dux just came out this year. Did you mean Last Hope’s revision, because that came out this year as well, two years after the original game.

2. I’m pretty sure i’m not a Dux fanboy considering all three releases this year have gotten the same exact thing from me: An interview to publicize the game and a pretty in-depth review.

3. There is no direct comparison to Dux in the review save for “Out of the 2009 releases for the Dreamcast, your money is better spent on that game.”

Dude, ALL Dreamcast games released in the past few years are homebrew titles and will be full of bugs and flaws. These games aren’t by full time professional developers. That doesn’t change the fact that out of all three Dreamcast releases so far, Rush Rush Rally Racing is easily the worst of the three. It’s not a bad game. It’s just a below average one.

I think it’s pretty obvious with the multiple errors in your logic, judgment and statements, that it is you who have the fanboy thing going on. I would suggest accepting that not everyone likes the same games as you.

wheres the revision version of DUX thats in the makes for almost a year? DUX has flaws and many bugs. and why the heck are you comparing Rush rush rally racing to DUX? those are two completly different games mate!